Mark R. Snavely

Mathematics Department Chair, Carthage College
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Welcome to my personal website!  It contains information on the courses I teach, together with a few more items of interest.  My students should check the Course Information page often.

What is the picture?

That is the filled in Julia Set for the complex function
f(z) = z2 +0.36 + (0.10) i.

Click on the image for a larger picture. The colored pictures show the attracting period 8 orbit.

How was the picture produced? Briefly, the pictures were produced by choosing points in the complex plane, plugging them into the function f defined above, and coloring them depending on which periodic point they joined in the cycle. Points of the same color move together from region to region! In the black diagram, the red dots are the actual periodic points.

"After I found encouragement, I had to learn persistence."

Soprano Nicole Cabell

"...so many things are possible just as long as you don't know they're impossible."

King Azaz and the Mathemagician, from The Phantom Tollbooth

"Life is deep and simple, and what our society gives us is shallow and complicated."

Fred (Mr.) Rogers